Cadence Anina Loudspeakers

Electrostatic hybrids

I've been up to the London Heathrow
hi-fi show oh 6 or 7 times over the last 10 years to gawp in awe at the best of
the fantastically exotic creations that the high-end world cooks up.

For those who've never had the pleasure,
you wander through the corridors of the hotel, listening to the sounds leaking
out from outside of the rooms & wander in when you hear something promising (or
at least that's how I do it!).

Trouble is about 90% of the time, what
you hear is often terribly flawed in some way  commonly a kind of
down-a-telephone mid-forward tonal balance, or harshness; or yes fantastically
transparent & detailed & dynamic, but oh so thin  where's the body  that natural body? More often than not, if a system has got
body, it's at the expense of sounding thick, which of course, is also no good.

I'm a tonal balance freak  if a
system's got a poor or unpleasant tonal quality  then it doesn't seem to matter
how many other wonderful qualities it's got, I just don't like it.

I usually come away having really liked
about 3 or 4 systems at a given show.

I have heard Cadence and their
particular brand of electrostatic hybrids at 5 of those shows & always been
enchanted by the combination of full-bodied-ness, vivacious, super-fresh upper
range sparkle (but never harshness) and great levels of transparency that seemed
to be consistent qualities over the different models.

Gotta have some...

So it was that I decided I must have
some of these Cadence hybrids for my own system. There is currently (as far as I
can tell) no UK-based distributor (please correct me if I'm wrong) & the Cadence
web site is sadly not much cop. So for UK buyers like myself, you're pretty much
stuck with either importing them from the US distributor OSS Audio (see www.ossaudio.com/cadencemain.htm), or going second hand. So it was that I
ended up buying a pair of Cadence Aninas second hand for the princely sum of
£561 (not bad when you consider that they retail at $5495 new)!

The Aninas are a floor-standing speaker
with an eight-inch reflex-loaded dynamic bass/mid driver in the bottom bit,
which crosses over at 1.35khz (about the middle of the mid-range) to an
electrostatic panel taking you seamlessly through the upper mid-range all the
way up to ultrasonic treble (30khz).

Anina is apparently Sanskrit for "The
Small One". Well, they're only small in-so-far as they're the smallest model in
the Cadence hybrid range. I called them medium; the missus thinks they're big
(but luckily she doesn't mind, cos they're nice-looking & she knows they sound
great). When you're better half says "you've got to keep these", you know they must be good...

The have the air of an artisan created
product  something more than just a commodity  which is of course what we're
all looking for in high-end hi-fi isn't it? We want products that are a mixture
of science and art. They are made in Pune, India - Cadence being one of only a
handful of high-end hi-fi companies based in India. The cabinets are very nicely
finished in solid hard-wood. It's a tactile & visual delight (not quite Sonus
Faber territory admittedly, but then what is?) that couldn't be further from
giving the impression of a mass-produced "commodity". They look pretty
distinctive too, with that curved electrostatic panel perched on top.

Playing around:

So I shoved the Aninas on the end of my
system and do you think I was instantly greeted by the amazingly sparkling
effervescent, superbly music-serving sound I'd heard at all those hi-fi shows?
In a word, no...Disjointed over heavy lumpy bass, harshness  no
this most emphatically was not the Cadence sound...

But then when you've been in this game
for a few years, you know that ain't gonna happen. Of course I knew that that
sound was there waiting to be unlocked, having heard all those other Cadence
hybrids over the years at the shows. So my comments on the sound quality of
these speakers are based on my findings after several months of
fiddle-fart-arsing around with them to fine-tune things to achieve the best
results.

I've never had a pair of speakers where
this hasn't been necessary  speaker positioning in particular is critical to achieving the best sound, which maybe goes some way to explaining the awful
sound of many set-ups at hi-fi shows and in people's homes. It's amazing that
any of the exhibitors has time to get it right  yet some of them do manage it. It's also a source of constant horror to me to see how many people
spend many thousands on very high-end equipment at home and then wack their
great big floor-standers right up against the back wall, or maybe 6 inches from
their turntable, presumably because their spouse dictates it for aesthetic
reasons...

In the case of the Aninas, what you need
to do is get them a long way apart  the image won't collapse. I'm sure it'll
vary, but in my small-ish room, they liked to be very close to the side-walls
(but with plenty of space behind them) and the exactdistance from
the side-walls was critical to achieving the highly integrated
musical result that I got in the end. The other critical thing was getting the
angle of toe-in precisely right (you can still see a good bit of the inside
sides of the cabinets from the central listening position). Get these 2 things
right and you're 95% there and the magic starts to come. You'll sure-as-hell
know it when you hear it! I stood them on marble plinths with (the audiophile's
friend) big blobs of Blu-Tac between plinth & hardwood floor and between plinth
and speaker-bottom. Again, far superior to spikes & coasters, or to Blu-Tac-ing
the speakers direct to the floor.

So what did I get when I'd finished
tweaking, you ask:

According to the Cadence web site (see www.cadenceaudio.com/productfr.html ): "Designed for smaller
listening areas, the ANINA is capable of producing the most epic musical sound-scapes".
And indeed, the first thing you notice is that they throw a
huge great expansive soundstage extending miles back from the speakers, in which
images are absolutely rock solid and stay that way even if you
have the audacity move your head!! You know what I'm talking about here, folks.
The sweet spot is gratifyingly large  anywhere on the 3 seat sofa will do! Next
you notice massive amounts of studio/hall ambience & reverb details  the kind
of thing that Stax headphone listeners are familiar with. The last track on the
"Bam! Mustaphas Play Stereo" 12-inch single by "3 Mustaphas 3" finishes with
greater & greater amounts of studio reverb being introduced, giving the
impression of those crazy Mustaphas playing in a big empty factory or something,
whilst the whole band are wheeled further & further away from you. No, really 
you've gotta check this one out! This sequence was rendered far more vividly
than I'm used to  the effect was one of every last ounce of reverb being fully
resolved  the empty factory sounded absolutely massive! Then you notice that
it's all done with a sparkling refined, beautiful musicfriendly tonal balance.

I played Radiohead's "Paranoid Android"
on CD to my "dearest" - a favourite recording that she has heard hundreds of
times before on various systems. She stopped her usual casual pottering about
type listening that she favours & began to listen intently, saying that she was
hearing lots of studio jiggery-pokery going on that she had never noticed before
& that it was giving the track a whole new dimension. I have to say this
surprised me a bit, because I had heard most of the same stuff on this
particular track on my old Elac speakers already. But the point is that I had
heard it through listening intently like a typical audiophile. The difference is
that the Aninas make such details blindingly obvious and it requires no special
effort or finely-honed audiophile sensibilities to hear them.

But there's more, because the extreme
lightness of those electrostatic diaphragms equals speed... Voices
and acoustic instruments have great drama; percussive sounds (including string
plucks etc) have all their subtleties revealed and explode out from the music,
giving it life. This speed can lead to electrostatic speakers
suffering from a sense of thin-ness and lack of body (one of my pet-hates), but
the moving coil bass driver fills in superbly and provides plenty of body in the
lower-mid, so that an acoustic guitar for example sounds like what it is - an
instrument that has a sound box on it to provide the full-bodied-ness. Too many
systems only seem to concentrate on the sound of the strings being plucked - so
it's all leading edge stuff  you know the sort of thing  "lightning fast
transients", but thin as hell. Others are full, but thickened  also no good.
Here you get the good bits of both. A recording off BBC Radio 3 FM
(recorded on to computer, using an M-Audio Audiophile USB external sound-card as
the ADC and then recorded as a WAV file, using the excellent free "Audacity"
software) of Ralph Towner playing a solo guitar piece live in the radio studio
was stunning in its realism. A large space was created behind the speakers in
which a real man seemed to be playing a real instrument. It was full of tonal
colour (colour  not colouration), vivid and fresh, but not aggressive  rather
like reality. Lighting fast real-sounding plucking of taught guitar strings AND
a fully reproduced sound of the guitar's body. Yes, you can have
your cake and eat it.

With the 12-inch vinyl single of the
Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush track "Don't Give Up", the voices had greater inner
harmonic detail and little ambient cues than I had realised were there on the
recording  adding to the already strong sense of great care in the production
of this track. The vocals were locked in space at dead centre and
a long way back from the speakers. They exhibited greater power than I'm used to
(but never aggressively thrown out) & yet were sweeter & purer. Stick on an mp3
of the same track & the magic was lost. Great layers of ambient information and
naturalness gone....And yet  it still sounded OK. Naturally, the
Cadences can't replace what isn't there at source, but they will try and make
the best of it.

Then there's the phase coherence 
electrostatic panels allow a large even-radiating area through mid-range to
upper treble  all from the same area, the same driver, the same dispersion
characteristics; no crossover components dividing the mid & treble introducing
phase-errors, etc, etc. In other words, you have many of the advantages of
single-driver speakers, without their debilitating losses of energy at the
frequency-extremes.

It sounds all-of-a-piece in that
comfortable easy way that live un-amplified acoustic instruments do.

There is deep bass a-plenty (Cadence
specs suggest extension down to 28Hz  within what limits is unspecified), but
(once they're properly positioned) it's never boomy or thickened. So Yello's
"Move, Dance, Be Born" from their album "Zebra" on CD gave out oodles of
near-subwoofer-ishly deep synth-bass, but it never boomed or interfered with
other parts of the music. All Yello's super-studio-trickery - which sounds so
good on a decent headphone set-up - remained fully intact & vividly revealed.
There are those who have commented in forums that there is poor integration
between the 2 very different drivers, with the Cadence breed of hybrid  I can
assure you that these people have failed to position them properly. They are
hearing lumpy, overblown bass (just as I initially heard), which
of course seems a poor match for the gossamer-lightness and complete lack of
inertia of the super-lightweight electrostatic panels' mid and treble. Some of
these people are feeding them with AV receivers  also not suitable. They are
very high resolution & therefore need very high-quality amplification to give
their best. Trouble is they have a nice friendly tonal balance & are easy to
drive. So the AV receiver seems to drive them easily, plus no tonal nasties, so
you blame the speakers for the limitations, but of course this is a fundamental
mistake. Highly resolving speakers require really high-quality amps. These
speakers actually will out-resolve lesser amps.

There's the feeling that a speaker
upgrade will never be needed (unless it was to a higher model in the Cadence
range. From memory, the higher models exhibit even greater amounts of that
champagne freshness & non-harsh sparkle in the mid & upper frequencies - they
have larger electrostatic panels - balanced by even more belt in the bass). No,
these strike me as "lifers"; but clearly one could constantly upgrade the
amplification to stratospheric levels and still always hear the benefits. My gut
feeling is that uber-quality valve amps such as the VAC Phi Beta, or Phi 300s
would really play to their strengths & be a match made in Heaven. Also the sweet
ultra-purity of Halcros would probably work brilliantly.

Luckily, you needn't go that far. These
are "accentuate the positive" types, rather than ruthlessly exposing the
negatives. They worked beautifully with my relatively modest Red Rose amp
(although I have to say the Red Rose is a humdinger  effortlessly and totally out-classing the £2000 Musical Fidelity a308 and the Unison Research
Unico, both of which I've had in my system). It drove them easily despite having
only about 35wpc.

My friend Dave - who plays his Meridian
506-24 CD player through a Musical Fidelity X-Cans V3 headphone amp into
Sennheiser HD-650s - commented that no details that he could hear
on his excellent headphone system were being lost  but that the Cadences were
all so much more graceful & pretty-sounding.

Which leads me onto... the caveat 
there's always a caveat, right? The Cadence view of the world is to make music
sound beautiful (as I said, they accentuate the positive)  possibly a bit more
beautiful than was sometimes intended. Or to put it another way  they're a bit rose-tinted. The same people that like a sweet-sounding push-pull
valve amp will like these. They're not for everyone. They're a bit little bit on
the warm side of neutrality & perhaps a little held back in the presence region,
then with a little extra compensatory air & sparkle in the treble  but this is
all artfully judged clearly by people who have ears and don't mind
using them to help design a musical product (once again the Sonus Faber approach
is a valid comparison). Those who value the warts'n'all approach - i.e. they
want mediocre recordings to sound mediocre, harsh recordings to sound harsh -
won't like em.

Me  I'm into hi-fi for the enjoyment of
music and I want it to be enjoyable for as much of the time as possible.

The Cadences are basically accurate and
real-sounding  they don't sound coloured; but then hanging off that basic
right-ness is an extra layer of golden honey & sparkling champagne. It suits me
just fine, but as I say it won't suit everyone (horn-lovers aren't likely to be
impressed, for example).

As you may have guessed, I really loved
these speakers & it's amazing to me to think that this is the bottom of the
Cadence range of hybrid speakers. For me it's the audio dream realised: the
transparency, speed & resolution of electrostatics, married to great tonal
beauty, excellent power-handling & bass-extension, plus good efficiency &
amplifier-friendliness. The family sound continues as you go up the range (right
up to the 17K Arca)  you just get more of everything. But these Aninas are so
good that I never feel I'm missing out  and I'm a fussy so-and-so!